The Oregonian: Book Review

Excerpted from The Oregonian:
Brilliantly, once John disappears from our view at that narrative precipice, Barbara’s viewpoint resumes for the disconcerting final fifth of the book, back in the post-9/11 States. In her roiling desperation to find her son, Barbara crashes prison transfers and harasses every politician who ever attended one of her fundraisers, accusing their aides of imitating Nazi functionaries when they have no answers for her She gains 20 pounds and grows scary, an ancient icon of the war-grieved mother. Read More.

On Fox News: God Talk

Faith & Terrorism: I was on Fox News this morning to talk about the NYC Bomber. Watch this clip from the show: http://live.foxnews.com/strategy-room/god-talk/#/v/4183605/terrorism-and-faith/?playlist_id=89555

Brookline Booksmith, Tuesday at 7

Reading at Brookline Booksmith: I am headed up to Boston tomorrow (May 4) to do a reading, q&a and signing at Brookline Booksmith. Please come, bring friends, support me and your local Indie bookstore simultaneously. And see the Boston Globe’s Spoken Word column for a short interview.

New Terrorism Studies to replace Bush’s Global War on Terror

From Nicholas Lemann’s review in The New Yorker (Apr 26): “But if the global war isn’t the right approach to terror what is? Experts on terrorism have produced shelves’ worth of new works on this question. For outsiders, reading this material can be a jarring experience. In the world of terrorism studies, the rhetoric of righteousness gives way to equilibrium equations. Nobody is good and nobody is evil. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not psychotics or fanatics; they’re rational actors–that is, what they do is explicable in terms of their beliefs and desires.”

USA Today Reviews American Taliban

There are many things to recommend Abraham’s novel: the purity and innocence that drives Parish on his quest for adventure and learning; the window it opens into the world of Islam and its magnificent culture and literature; the story of Parish’s parents and how their son’s eventual disappearance brings them to the brink of insanity. It’s a story as preposterous as it is credible. –USA TODAY
READ MORE

Newtonville Book’s Q&A

Q&A from Newtonville Books

-Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.

Virginia Woolf, because she was deeply engaged in the modernist experiment, believed in difficulty, enjoyed talking about it with other writers, though they never come off well in her diaries. And she was a great conversationalist, loved parties. Truly fun conversation is so rare; I can’t remember ever having one at a party. READ MORE.

Radio Interview with Jeff Schechtman on KVON, Napa Valley

KVON (Napa Valley) Interview with Jeff Schechtman:

Are we so walled off that we look at personal exploration and the search for self as an act to be suspicious of? There was a time when students traveled to exotic parts of the world as a way to do what young people do, that is to explore and find themselves. Today, imagine a middle class kids who travels to the Middle East on a spiritual quest and winds up there on the eve of 9/11. This is the backdrop of Pearl Abraham’s new novel American Taliban: A Novel.

Oblong Books, Millerton, NY

I will be reading & signing at Oblong Books in Millerton on Sat., April 24th at 7:30 p.m. Please support both me and your local Indie book store: Even if you’ve already purchased a copy of AMERICAN TALIBAN, buy another one for a friend.

Newtonville Books Event

I will be at Newtonville Books this Thursday, April 15th, 7pm for a reading, q&a, and signing.
Hope to see you there.

Newtonville Books
296 Walnut Street
Newton, MA 02460-1907

Review and Interview at Bookpage.com

American Taliban is reviewed by Lauren Bufferd for bookpage. A q&a follows. Excerpt:
Q. What do you think a fictionalized or imagined account of a real-life person or event can tell us that a book of nonfiction cannot?
A. If you believe, as I do, that imaginative empathy, which demands stretching yourself, is one of the most powerful ways to understand the other, then a fictionalized imagined account has greater access to that understanding. Facts often tell us very little, and sometimes, perhaps I should say often, they turn out not to be factual, as we know from our study of historical accounts.